A chink in the Indo-Pak ice

Peace overtures call for cautious pragmatism

Over the past week, small signs of a thaw in India-Pakistan relations, which have been frozen since 2016, raise fresh hopes of a more lasting peace between the two nations. On January 18, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif indicated his desire for peace with India in an interview with a Dubai-based TV channel, saying Pakistan had learnt its lessons after being defeated in three wars, which only brought “more misery, poverty and unemployment to the people”. Later, his office walked back the comments a bit, stipulating that talks could take place only when India reversed its decision to end special status on Kashmir. Though the government is unlikely to accede to this condition, since it considers the reading down of Article 370 a signature achievement, it nevertheless chose to read the signals from Islamabad with relative charity. Less than a week later, an invitation was extended to Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers’ meeting that India would be hosting in Goa in May.

The strategy of hosting the Pakistan foreign minister within the framework of a regional multilateral meeting indicates the cautionary lessons that the Narendra Modi government has absorbed. This approach stands in contrast to the grand gestures in the initial years, when then prime minister Nawaz Sharif, brother of the current incumbent, was invited to Mr Modi’s prime ministerial inauguration in 2014, and the Indian PM’s surprise stopover at Lahore on the return leg of an Afghanistan trip in 2015 to greet Nawaz Sharif on his birthday. But personal overtures between political leaderships could not overcome age-old geopolitical rivalries stoked by Pakistan’s powerful military-intelligence complex. The frequency of cross-border terrorism steadily increased, culminating in near-war after the Indian Air Force targeted militants across the Line of Control in Balakot.

The current peace feelers from the Pakistan prime minister, however, follow two years of relative calm after the two armies agreed to honour the terms of a 2003 ceasefire agreement in February 2021, which has more or less held. No doubt, the critical state of Pakistan’s economy, caught between a foreign exchange crisis and chronic domestic political instability, has played its role in the civilian government’s impulse for peace. It is worth noting, too, that the political impulses for rapprochement are strong enough on both sides for India to overlook a deeply disparaging remark by Mr Zardari about Mr Modi on the sidelines of a UN conference last month.

That said, it would be important for the Indian foreign policy not to expect a meeting in the salubrious sea air of Goa to alter dramatically the dynamics of Indo-Pak tensions. For one, Islamabad is yet to respond to the invitation. For another, Pakistan’s military establishment, the key arm of its government, has not expressed an opinion on the subject. Third, even peace initiatives with the military’s sponsorship can fail, as they did quite spectacularly at Agra in 2001 in a summit between then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee and military dictator Pervez Musharraf over Kashmir. India has seen its Parliament (2001) and its financial capital Mumbai (2008) subject to Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attacks since. Pragmatism, thus, remains the watchword.